Ben Ralston

  • About Ben
    • Ben on Video
    • Ben on Elephant Journal
  • Sangha
  • Work with Ben
  • Resources
  • Testimonials
  • Contact
    • Facebook
    • Youtube

Feb 22 2012

The latest Yoga scandal? Or prefer to read about Truth?

30 or so years ago I lied to my Father and he caught me out. I remember being afraid, and tensing up in anticipation of a whack or a stern rebuke. But there was just a very long pause, a pause that felt like falling, falling through space – no roots, nothing to ground me. Then he warmly and simply said:

“There’s nothing I despise more than a lie”.

He looked at me kindly and left it at that.
He wasn’t always such a magnificent teacher, but that day, he nailed it.
I’ve spent my whole life since searching for Truth.
At school I sat in countless classrooms watching the parade of old men whose life-blood slipped away while they bullshitted themselves (and each other, and my parents) that they were teaching anything worthwhile. There was no truth to be found there.
On the television endless advertisements, people with too-white teeth and too-wide smiles, trying to persuade me that they were honest and good and that I needed what they were selling. No truth there.
On the streets and in the shops and buses and trains I saw everyone trying to convince themselves that they were alright, happy, safe. But I saw through their deception. No truth.
In Churches and in Synagogues I listened to readings from dusty old books and I felt the disconnect between what was being read, and the person reading it. There was no truth there, no true Faith, only blind, wishful-thinking, and the wise child that I was wasn’t fooled.
(When I finally realized that my parents weren’t superheroes) I saw my Father struggling to balance his dignity with the daily grind of trying to become – what? A millionaire? A billionaire? And I failed to see the truth in that.
I saw my Mother’s sense of unfulfilled, unrealized potential, and the emptiness inside that she occasionally tried to fill with wine, chewing gum, or television, and I knew that she hadn’t found the truth that I was looking for.
So I spent many years knowing only what I didn’t want. I didn’t want my life to be a lie. I knew that with all my heart. I yearned for a not-lie. But I had no idea what that was. I had no idea what the truth looked like, or how it felt, or even if I would recognize it if it were right in front of me, with a big flashing neon sign:

Herein lies TRUTH.

Actually, I would have turned away. When you are so conditioned by delusion and hypocrisy… when all you have ever known is deception… when the fabric of your society is woven with pretense… then the truth is something to be feared!
I have another, earlier memory. Mr Morton may have been a rare example in my life of a good school teacher. He seemed very old to me then, with grey whiskers and a stooped gait, and when he sat at the front of the class he would interlock his fingers, rotating one thumb around the other in what seemed like a frantic attempt to slow down time… I had the sense that there was a great energy about to bubble up in him, about to boil over… and if he didn’t keep on twiddling his thumbs like that he wouldn’t be able to stop it.
One of my peers must have lied to him one day, because he exploded, whiskers shaking, mouth foaming, eyes bulging. When he’d finished there were some nervous  sniggers, but we all – each and every one of us in that room that day knew that we’d seen and heard Truth directly:
“When you start to tell lies you enter a very dangerous arena, a grey world where black and white blur into one, and right and wrong lose their meaning. And one day you will find yourself an altogether grey person, because you will have started to believe your own lies.”
We live in a grey world. Our society is very, very grey – phone hacking, money-makes-money banking, countries invaded under the guise of WMD that were never there. Soap operas and adverts and MTV and internet-filters and rigged elections and Arms Fairs and Oil dependency and Global Warming and… on and on. One scandal, one controversy after another.
This is what happens when spiritual practice is used as a vehicle for fame and fortune, when personal gain trumps respect for lineage, when the student proclaims himself teacher of teachers. (The link is to a post I wrote the other day about the corruption of Eastern spirituality by Western materialism, specifically – yoga teachers training more yoga teachers).
Does our society support a quest for freedom and truth, or does it encourage us to rejoice in the illusion of gossip and malicious rumor like pigs rolling in mud?
There is only one solution to the problem, and that is to stop relying on that society. It doesn’t mean that you can’t be part of it. You can still play the game – but by your own rules.
Be aware that Truth is the gateway to freedom. And don’t compromise in your search for, and expression of, that truth.
Not long ago a student asked me the secret to happiness. I answered:

“Never compromise”.

She was somewhat surprised, because let’s face it, most of us grew up being taught the opposite – that compromise is an integral part of happiness!
How many times were you told:
“’You can’t have it all’… ‘choose one or the other’… ‘dreams don’t come true’… ‘better the devil you know’…”
or variations of the above?
But I’m here to tell you differently: by all means, compromise with your partner over which movie you watch, or what you have for dinner; compromise with a colleague over how you go about completing a task. Compromise on the little things. Compromise your desires.
But when it comes to something big – love, work, your aspirations and dreams: don’t compromise – not one iota. Don’t take a single step off the path of meaningful, intentional life. Know what you want, and go for it, with 110% of your energy. And when something gets in the way, either jump over, or go around, or wait patiently until it moves away again, because it will move if your intention is strong.
Don’t lose sight of what is important to you – your values – and don’t compromise on them. If you do, the day will come when you look back on your life and see only a lies. I can’t imagine anything worse.
Mr Morton was right.
One lie leads to another. What starts out as a simple excuse for why you stay with the partner who doesn’t totally rock your world leads to a whole world-wide-web of self-deceit. That’s just the beginning, because next you have to convince the rest of the world about it too!
Before you know it, life is grey and foggy.
It takes a great deal of courage to be really honest with yourself. The very reason we deceive ourselves is because we’re afraid. So to be honest means to be doubly courageous – you have to have the cojonesto confront your fears, and to then carry on in spite of them. You have to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’.
That might mean leaving a partner, or a job, or a home, or a college. It might mean coming out about your sexuality, or travelling the world, or learning a language, or whatever. These are big, scary things. But they are gateways – you can either go through that gateway to freedom, or you can stay hiding behind the door.
Hide behind that door and remain in a dark, shadowy, grey world where the search for love, peace, and freedom is utterly pointless. Death will come for you full of regrets.
But step through that door and be dazzled by full-spectrum multi-chromatic rainbow-colored Glory.
The choice is ours to make, and we are all making that choice, every moment of every day.

What do you choose?

If you’re feeling it, share it. ‘Like’ it up on FB, and leave a comment, please.

Written by Ben Ralston · Categorized: Father, honesty, truth, Uncategorized, yoga

Sep 06 2011

Why we are all nothing more than ants (and no less than Gods)

I don’t know how old I was exactly (somewhere between 8 and 11) when my Father took me for a walk one evening. The magic of being up late in the balmy summer twilight, and that oh-so-precious time with my Dad meant that something special had to happen.
And it did.
As we walked along the street we chatted, and it was just another day. Just another moment sliding by.
Then we stopped and my Father looked up at the sky, my hand in his. I looked up too and he began to tell me, with a ‘time is not sliding by now’ tone of voice, just how big the universe is.
He explained how many planets there are in our Solar system, and how many Galaxies there are, and the distance from here to the moon, and so on. I don’t remember the details, but I do remember that as he outlined the vastness of the universe, I began to realize just how tiny and insignificant I am. By the time he finished, I felt like an ant.
But I also felt like God…

Time had stopped sliding. In fact, it had just stopped. It had expanded in every direction, and stopped. It was infinite. The Universe (space) and that moment (time) had become one. Time and space stretched away from me in every direction, and I just stood there, feeling like God.
I can’t describe that moment any better. It was a revelation. That’s all. It might have been the best thing my Father ever did for me.
*** 

20 years later I was an addict. Yeah, some of you don’t know this, but I spent 2 years of my life in a room in Swiss Cottage, London, eating nothing but baked beans and take-away Balti.   
Those 2 years almost killed me…
I’m not kidding. I’m not exaggerating. I nearly destroyed myself there. I did lose friends, money, time, and health. But I’m still here. I didn’t lose my life.
You’re probably wondering what I was addicted to…
It’s embarrassing. If you’re a recovering heroin addict, or a recovering alcoholic, or a recovering pretty-much-anything-else-you-can-think-of, at least there’s a certain enigma to it.
I’m a recovering video game addict. Not so ‘cool’ huh?
Oh well, at least I’m alive.
Anyway, I lived on beans and balti for a while, and spent 20 hours a day trying to save the world from Nazi aggression.
The game I played was a WW2 strategy game called Sudden Strike 2. An amazing game, very complex, requiring a lot of skill and team-play. I got so good at it that the team of players I got together won the European championships… which were really the world championships, because they were the only championships that existed. So players from all over the world took part.
When I first started playing, I met a German guy called Warhead (he wasn’t really called Warhead, that was just his nickname). He destroyed me in a 1v1 game, and taught me a good lesson. He also told me that all the German players were the best, but really arrogant, and how he’d like to get a great team together to beat the arrogant Germans at the championships the next year. I told him to teach me all he knew, and that together we’d do it.
And that’s what happened. We won the next year. But it almost cost me my life.
I’ve got lots more to write about this: about addiction, and healing, and how being an addict is like living inside a prison inside yourself, and how healing is just all about breaking free of that prison.
I want to say that every one of you reading this is an addict too, but most of you don’t even know it. The ones you hear about – like me, yes – who are addict addicts, are just the ones who are most sensitive and open. They don’t know how to adapt to a world that seems too big for them, and they don’t know how to handle the pain of it all, and they need something to ease that pain; to make them feel safe. So they become addicted, in a way that is very obvious and painful to those around them.
When I was 24 I had a beautiful girlfriend called Adele. She was a dancer. She found me one evening in the Back Bar – a gay bar I was working in by mistake (long story for another time) – and insisted that we go home together. It was a beautiful, bitter-sweet relationship that taught me a lot.
Adele’s Father was an alcoholic. He was really seriously in trouble when I met him. He kept trying to kill himself. Once I spent Christmas with Adele and her family and her Dad threw himself off a bridge. (Into a river. In Scotland. In December). He simply couldn’t handle any more moments sliding by. He survived, and we spent a lot of time that Christmas in the hospital. I talked to him a lot. He was a sweet, funny guy, who just didn’t understand the hypocrisy and corruption and deceit of this world. He didn’t know how to play the game of life, so he gave up and played the game of alcoholism instead.
It was a very sad Christmas.
The biggest lesson I learnt from meeting Adele’s Dad was: you can’t make people change. And it’s one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learnt.
Sometimes people contact me to ask if I can help their loved ones. And I often have to say:
“No”.
I don’t help people who aren’t ready to help themselves. It’s a waste of my time and theirs. You can’t make people change.
It’s a bit of a cliché, but very true about addiction: you usually have to hit rock bottom before you’re ready to start climbing back up.
When I became an addict, it was because I’d completely forgotten about the part of me that wasn’t ant. I felt I was 100% ant. Feeling so small and insignificant; powerless to change anything about each moment that simply slides on by, regardless. Lost in time and space, with no purpose other than pain.
Now, after healing all the hurt that caused me to forget my God-ness, my Beingness, I am whole again. Now I feel half-ant, half-god again. And it’s so good to be alive. It’s good to be a vital part of a vast universe, and to know that the sheer magic and wonder of life is the means and end of itself.
It’s Good.


(Please, leave a comment. Comments are the currency of blogs…
and help spread the love by sharing it – Tweet, facebook, email, etc: you can use the green ‘ShareThis’ button below.)

Written by Ben Ralston · Categorized: consciousness, Father, God, healing, Uncategorized

Aug 26 2011

Why I had to leave Bangkok after just one night. Part 1 – The Girl with Black Eyes.

I cried a little writing this. Sometimes, I am ashamed to be a man…
I was 21 years old and I went to Thailand. A guy I knew who was very cool had been there, so I thought that perhaps if I went to Thailand, I’d be cool too. As far as I can remember that was my motivation… and I guess I wanted to grow up a little.
Well, I grew up a little.
It’s funny. Before I left, my Mum begged me to promise to call her every day. I thought she was insane and I assured her in no uncertain terms that I would not be giving her daily progress reports. As it turned out though, she had good reason to worry!
I’d planned to stay 3 nights in Bangkok, and then get on a train and go North. It didn’t work out that way…
When I arrived, I headed for the area where all the tourists usually stay. I forget the name (Khao San road?), but it’s very well know. And actually, the place I ended up staying is the place where Leonardo DiCaprio’s character stays in the movie The Beach. I was there first, but only for one night.
I was 21 years old and alone in a very strange land. I went down the steps into the sitting area below and ordered a beer. I remember feeling like a fish out of water. I don’t know what I was thinking, going to Thailand. I wasn’t comfortable in my own skin, let alone South East Asia. But there I was…
And there were a couple of old Thai Dudes playing chess, and I sat near them and plucked up the courage to watch. In the end, I had a game with one of them (my Dad taught me to play chess when I was about 5 years old, and by the time I was 15 I was beating him consistently. He was a very, very sore loser, and wouldn’t speak to me after we played. He’d just go to bed sulking. I never let him win though, even though my Mum asked me to when he was sick. I couldn’t do that to him. I loved him too much).
Anyway, here’s what happened in Bangkok:
I played a little chess with this old Thai Dude and he was a bit of a charmer. After our game, he invited me out for some “traditional Thai food and music”. I was really happy – I wanted to get to know the real Thailand, not just the Khao San road (or whatever it’s called). So off we went… and ended up in this fairly tacky looking restaurant. The manager was floating around us, wringing his hands and doing his best “I’m servile and I’ll do anything for a tip” act. The band played synthesized Western rock songs. It was awful. And the only other thing I remember from the evening was the girl with black eyes…
The Thai dude called over the manager and whispered in his ear, and the manager scuttled off somewhere and came back a few minutes later with a young Thai girl. I’d say she was 11 years old. I’m usually very good at guessing people’s ages. I usually get it spot on.
I’d say she was 11. But she had black eyes. I don’t mean the color – although, I think that the color of her eyes was black too. What I mean is that there was no light – no light, whatsoever – in her eyes. There was only darkness.
Can you imagine? Have you ever seen a child with no light in their eyes? It’s unimaginable. Her eyes weren’t eyes. They were black holes.
She stood in front of me, and looked through me. I could feel her discomfort, her total unease… no, her hate.
The Thai Dude told me that for a few dollars I could do whatever I wanted with her, and for a few dollars more I could have her for the night.
The charm, and the chit-chat, and the chess game, and the pretense, all fell away. I felt sick to my stomach.
I leaned forward to try to talk to this girl; to reassure her that I didn’t want anything from her. But she recoiled. She didn’t speak a word of English, and she trusted me as much as all the other men she’d ever known.
I wanted to rescue her. I wanted to pull out my Uzi and kill every motherfucker in there – the band, The Dude, the manager, and any other cunt who had any part in all of this. I wanted to throw this girl over my shoulder and get her the fuck out of there.
I didn’t have an Uzi, but I swear to God I would have killed those people with my bare hands there and then if there had been a chance of helping her. If she had seen me for who I was, and let me help her, I would have. But there was nothing I could do.
The feeling I had was like when you are in a restaurant, and you see a lobster being taken out of the tank and dropped into boiling water. This girl with black eyes was like an 11-year-old girl in boiling water, and I was powerless to help her.
In the end all I could do was stand up and walk out of there. I walked out into the night, no clue where I was, and somehow found my way back to the hotel. The next day I left Bangkok. I couldn’t stand to stay there any longer.
I’ll never forget that girl, and how she looked right through me.

Part 2

Part 3

Written by Ben Ralston · Categorized: abuse, Father, sexual abuse, truth, Uncategorized

Jul 15 2010

THE LIMIT OF MY COMPASSION

“My body was telling me not to leave. I didn’t listen…”


As I sat in meditation this morning a memory passed like a freight train through my mind:

the memory of what was by far the longest and hardest day of my life.

I’ve learnt to know the difference between low-key, ‘random’ thoughts, and deeply subconscious ‘stuff’ that comes up in meditation for good reason; so I paid attention.

In May 2008, a couple of weeks after Petra and I got married here in Slovenia, I had a phone call from my Mother. She told me if I wanted to see my (very sick) Father again, I’d better come soon. I  came off the phone and immediately booked a flight for the following day. I would fly back to England on the Friday, stay the weekend, and come home to Slovenia on Monday morning. (Petra was leaving on the Tuesday morning to go to India for a month to study Ayurvedic massage, and I wanted to see her off).

I flew home with the realization that this was probably the last time I’d see my Father – a realization that filled my whole physical and emotional being with a deep sadness. He’d been ill for a long time, and we’d all known this moment would be coming, but even so… there is no way to prepare for loss. It happens, and then you deal with it.




When I saw him that day, the horror left me feeling numb. He was very, very ill. As I look back now, I realize that if I’d taken time to think about it, I would have known that he had only days left. Subconsciously, I did know; but consciously, I avoided thinking at all. It was too painful.

I spent some time with him, but he was so weak that no communication was possible. He had long since lost the use of his voice, and now he could barely move. His neck muscles were too weak to support his head, so eye contact was difficult. I spent most of the time with my Mother, talking with her and trying as best I could to support her.

The weekend passed, and suddenly it was Monday morning. I learnt that morning what it means to have a ‘heavy heart’. However, when I said goodbye to my Father for the last time, there were no tears and no drama. I gave him a hug, stroked his head, and whispered, “I love you Pops”. He summoned up the strength to lift his head and give me a look of love that I’ll never forget.
Then I went downstairs and left for the airport. My bags weighed nothing compared to the physical feeling of heaviness. My body was telling me not to leave. I didn’t listen.

At the airport I was the first person in the departure lounge. I was set on getting home to Slovenia and putting behind me the pain of seeing my Father in that condition. All I could think of was finding some temporary solace in my wife’s arms.

Slowly, the lounge filled. The plane was outside on the tarmac, and through the window I could see the luggage being stowed on the plane.
Then, I had a sudden and peculiar urge: I wanted to buy a newspaper. (The reason this was peculiar was that I rarely used to read the papers).
The plane wasn’t boarding yet; I had plenty of time. Besides, they always announce the boarding, right?


I walked down the hallway to the shop, and bought a paper and a bottle of water. It must have taken me 3 – 5 minutes, but when I returned, the lounge was empty! The strangest feeling came over me – the heaviness in my body was now accompanied by a feeling of complete emotional emptiness, as if every cell in my body was hollow – as I realized what was about to happen.

I ran the few steps to the flight departure gate, where a woman in uniform was counting ticket stubs. She didn’t even look up as she told me that I had missed my flight.

The world went into slow motion. I could see my plane still sitting outside – two lines of people slowly climbing the stairways into the front and back – the ground crew scurrying around like ants, still finishing their flight preparations.

I pleaded with the woman in front of me.
Would she let me run down and join the back of the line…
would she radio the plane and ask the cabin crew if I could go down…
my wife was going away, my father was dying, please, I needed to get on that plane.

If she would just look at me, maybe I could communicate how important this was. As I raised my voice, she did look up: to inform me that if I continued to behave in a threatening manner she would call the police. She was a stony-faced, cold-eyed woman, and nothing I could say or do would change that fact. I wasn’t getting on that plane.

As I walked away, my world crumbled. I couldn’t stay in England; I couldn’t bear to see my Father like that again. I needed to be with my wife; to be home.

I had to wait 2 hours in the departure lounge for a ground crew to come and ‘escort’ me disdainfully back to the check-in desks. I booked another flight from another airport on the other side of London, and then traveled two hours by train to get there. That flight was delayed, so I finally arrived back in Slovenia at 2am. Petra’s parents were there to meet me, and drove me back to our home, where we arrived at 4am. On arriving home, I saw that my car had a flat tire, so I then had to drive my parents in law home, and return with their car in order to be able to drive Petra to the airport 30 minutes later (she had an early morning flight). I successfully saw her off to India at the airport!

I then drove home, having been traveling non-stop for about 36 hours, having had no sleep and only 30 brief minutes with my wife at 5 o’clock in the morning.

When I arrived back home from Ljubljana airport (again), I sat down and felt more alone than I had ever felt in my life: heavy and empty and utterly alone.

I made a cup of tea, and the phone rang: my brother. My Father had been rushed to hospital that morning, where he had just died.
I couldn’t believe it.
Deep down, I had known.

I realized at the time that I should have stayed in England that day: missing my flight was a good thing! Everything happens for a reason. I should have stayed and been with my Father when he passed on. I knew he was dying, and missing my flight was no ‘accident’.
I should have been there for my Father and Mother and my Brothers.

But it was only this morning, as the memory of that weekend came flooding back to me during meditation, that I was able to see clearly why I didn’t listen to all the signs.

I was selfish, and I lacked compassion.

Truth be told, I couldn’t stand being with my Father when he was ill. It was too painful. It made me feel helpless and useless and so, so sad. And although it pains and embarrasses me to admit it, I couldn’t bear the smell of stale body fluids and atrophying muscles.
I didn’t know how to handle the situation of someone I love slowly dying.

I realize now how selfish I was: I put my feelings before my Fathers’. What was he going through? His body was in excruciating pain and he knew he was dying.
I put my feelings before his. How utterly selfish.

As I sat meditating this morning, my mind went back to that other morning two years ago. I apologized to my Father, and visualized myself doing now what I was unable to do then: staying in England, being with my Father and my family at a time when they needed me. Putting others first.

I learnt a little about compassion: to be able to sit with someone who is sick just because they need you. Just to sit, putting up with a smell, and with my own discomfort, and perhaps finding joy in giving solace to another.

To offer solace rather than seek it.

I learnt, most importantly, about the limits of MY compassion. I am a spiritual teacher. I have always known myself to be compassionate – I have many times saved animal’s lives, helped people in difficulty, and made tough decisions based purely on compassion. But each of us, unless we are truly en-lightened, has a limit. How strange that the limit of my compassion was found in a situation with someone that I loved the most! But then that is what relationships are for: sometimes only through relationship can we learn the hardest lessons. As Buddha said:
“The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”


And again I learnt that my Father was a great teacher.


(If you enjoyed this article, you might like: Tribute to my Father.)

Written by Ben Ralston · Categorized: consciousness, Father, love, meditation, relationship, Uncategorized

May 28 2010

A TRIBUTE to my Father

2 years ago today, my Father died.
I don’t like looking back – I too much enjoy being present to this momentary NOW, and it took me a long time to get here!
But sometimes it’s necessary to acknowledge (to recognize and to accept) that part of the present is our connection with the past. Sometimes it’s necessary to look back and reflect upon where we came from. Today feels like one of those times…
My Old Man died of a rare neurological disease called Motor Neurone Disease (or ALS if you’re American, or sometimes it’s known as Lou Gehrig’s disease – that’s how rare it is: no one can agree what to call it!)
It’s a particularly bad disease to get (in case you’re planning on getting a disease) because it’s basically a slow burning death sentence. Bit by bit, the body stops working. And the medical establishments have no idea what causes it, and less idea what to do about it.
My Dad’s disease first showed up in his throat – one day his speech started slurring. He told me about a phone call he’d had from an old work colleague – who asked him if he’d been drinking. He wasn’t a big drinker – actually, he was one of the most sober people you could ever meet. So this old work colleague was surprised! But he hadn’t been drinking. It’s just that his vocal chords were wasting away.
In the end, his body packed in completely. I had a phone call one day from my Mother – if I wanted to see him again while he was still alive I should come home soon. So I got on a plane the next day, and spent the weekend with him. It was one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen in my life – the man who when I was a child, seemed super-human; my hero, reduced to a skeletal ‘bag of bones’.
I’ve seen footage of the American G.I.’s who liberated the Nazi concentration camps, and they were crying like babies: those men who’d fought their way through the second world war, openly crying their eyes out at the sight of the camp prisoners. That’s how I felt. But this was a man I knew. My Father.
I spent the weekend with him. He couldn’t speak, so there wasn’t much communication. He couldn’t even hold eye contact, because his neck muscles couldn’t support the weight of his head. He was very weak. But when the time came for me to leave, he made a huge effort to sit up, and we hugged. I whispered in his ear,
“I love you Pops”.
He looked at me for a long moment, and gave me a ‘gesture’, like a nod, that I’ll never forget. That simple gesture expressed all at once encouragement, love, and respect. And in his eyes I saw that he was at peace.
We both knew, He and I, that we would never see each other again.
Seeing the peace in his eyes that day was one of the most beautiful moments of my life!
The saddest and most beautiful moments of my life, in one weekend. What a rollercoaster ride!
Why was that moment beautiful? Because for years he’d been fighting with life. He was quite a fighter too – he would fight on and on until the bitter end (which is exactly what he did then), and never admit defeat. There were only two choices for him – victory or defeat, success or failure.
In life, he couldn’t see another way – it was only in the manner of his death that he knew peace and acceptance.
I’d been trying for years to get him to see that sometimes we have to accept life on it’s own terms. Sometimes we have to bow down to a higher power: god; destiny; spirit; a deeper wisdom – call it what you will. Sometimes, LIFE has plans for us, and the only way to be happy and healthy is to YIELD to those plans. To ‘go with the flow’.
I’d been trying for years, and of course my trying mirrored his fighting! My Father’s son! So the more I tried, the more he fought, and the more frustrated I became. And we grew apart a little…
But in that moment, when he looked into my eyes and I saw that serenity, peace, acceptance… in that moment he taught me what I had been trying all along, in my vanity and ego, to teach him!
It’s not easy – to surrender control. To surrender. But it’s so important. I believe that the disease my Father had (Motor Neurone / ALS / Lou Gehrig’s disease) is caused by that refusal to surrender. I believe that it probably happens mostly to people who want to CONTROL life, and can’t stand to admit defeat.
(I would love to have the opportunity to work with someone who has MND – I’m a healer – to see if I’m right: to see if I can heal them. If you know anyone who has it, and has the courage to fight it in an alternative way, to try something new, point them in my direction please.)
Nothing is incurable if you know the cause.
So here’s my tribute to my Father: my first hero, and a wonderful man. He taught me in life the importance of honesty and integrity; and in his death he taught me the importance of surrender and acceptance. What a great teacher!
He died two years ago today, but he lives on in my heart.
If you enjoyed this post, you might particularly like this – the story of what happened after I hugged him goodbye, got in a taxi, and went to the airport. The story of the longest, hardest day of my life, and probably also the single biggest lesson I ever learnt.
Before you go, please spread the love – share via FB, Tweet, Stumbleupon, etc… and leave a comment.


Written by Ben Ralston · Categorized: acceptance, death, Father, peace, surrender, Trust, Uncategorized

© Copyright 2016 Ben Ralston · All Rights Reserved · Photos by Catherine Adam ·